From the settlement layer view, the growing adoption of Bitcoin is increasing its liquidity internationally, allowing it to compete with global reserve currencies for increasingly more valuable transactions, causing transaction fees to rise.

I personally suspect that Bitcoin’s steadily improving privacy will prevent us from ever measuring decentralization in a truly objective way. Losing easy quantification but gaining stronger privacy seems like a good tradeoff to me.

Like with most things, Bitcoin Dominance is a very crude metric and one that’s unfortunately very easy to manipulate. The recent enthusiasm for ICOs has made the manipulation even worse and continues to hide the fact that Bitcoin is doing really well.

Bitcoin makes conspiratorial group cohesion more difficult. If the Fappening took place as I described, then this effect is right at the center. The possibility of getting bitcoins by releasing secrets caused the group to fall apart.

Protecting ourselves from the dangers of crypto-anarchy requires embracing it even more fully and internalizing and practicing the virtues that have helped great men weather the storms of life since antiquity.

Bitcoin provides us alternatives to compelled trust in monopolies but it can never obviate the need for trusted human connections. Nor can it protect us from our own pesky brain bugs’ ambiguous filters on perceived reality.

Potential Bitcoin attackers are in a Prisoner's Dilemma. In the same way that the people cannot easily rebel against the king owing to a lack of coordination on their part, governments cannot rebel against Bitcoin for the same reason. The government puts the people in a Prisoner's Dilemma against one another, and Bitcoin does the same to government agents.

There is a fundamental agency problem with Bitcoin: agents can disappear or simulate a heist upon themselves. They cannot rationally be trusted without extreme costs being imposed on them which are more stringent than traditional banks.

Someone still lost in the dollar world looks at Bitcoin and sees wild and extreme volatility, whereas someone in Bitcoin looking back at the dollar sees the worst and longest economic crash in history.

New capital formation is the impetus for two trends that push the equilibrium of all industries towards decentralized markets: increasing technological sophistication and a deepening of the division of labor.